The city of Slidell begins a $4.5 million project fix to repair drainage and sewer problems caused by Hurricane Katrina. The work is also designed to reduce flooding in the city.

FEMA will pick up the tab for construction in the Schneider Canal Drainage Basin. Residents living between the canal, highway 11 and Old Spanish Trail, expect construction starting this month and continuing over the course of the next year.

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According to the city’s engineer, Blane Clancy, the following neighborhoods will be affected:

Abney Estates

Abney Square

Alexander Oaks

Eagle Point

Little Addition

Magnolia Heights

Mansions of Spartan Trace

Pelican Plaza

Pinecrest (South of Old Spanish Trail)

San Souci Park

Spartan Trace

Sugar Mill

Tammany Mall

Westchester Estates

Windsor Place

Magnolia Construction out of Baton Rouge won the bid. They will begin staging equipment next week, and construction could start as early as March 14. Magnolia promised residents advanced notice of closures during the 12 month project.

“The key to it is just communication and a little bit of patients,” John Simmons with Magnolia Construction said. “I’d love to be able to say that nobody’s going to be inconvenienced, but we know for a job like this to go in we’re going to have to take some streets up and put some pipe in the ground.”

Simmons expects to finish the project ahead of the March 2017 completion date if weather cooperates. A $500-per-day penalty fee is built in to the city’s contract with Magnolia if it is delayed.

But before getting the greenlight and federal dollars to pay for it, city leaders had to convince FEMA the damage was caused by hurricane Katrina.

“What happened was when the water stood on our streets for days and days at a time, our streets are not designed to hold that amount of weight,” Freddy Drennan, mayor of Slidell, said. “And what did we do immediately after that? Go in to clear the streets and put heavy equipment on top of those saturated road beds.”

All of that water and weight crushed water lines, sewer lines and drainage built under the roadbed. That infrastructure is now the bulk of the project’s scope.

All the construction is happening on the north side of the canal, but the people who live in South Slidell say nothing has been done to protect them from a storm surge or future flooding. That's because areas south of the canal, closest to Lake Pontchartrain, are unincorporated.

In the past, the city has sand bagged the road near the canal ahead of major storms to protect Slidell from flooding. Residents south of the canal say three-miles of Oak Harbor from Highway 11 to Interstate 10 has flooded because of the blockage, leaving their neighborhoods standing as islands surrounded by floodwater. The current project and the larger $64million Katrina-related work in Slidell does not address flooding south of the city, because those areas lie outside of city limits.

“It does not protect anyone in Eden Isles, Clippers, all those people,” Katherine Politt said. “They’re left out to dry.”

But there is a push happening now to change that. Kurt Hutchinson sits on the newly created St. Tammany Parish Levee Board which met Wednesday with the Costal Protection and Restoration Agency (CPRA), a state agency. Hutchinson said South Slidell gets hit when flood waters come in and then again when water in areas north recede. He explained that there are still some hoops to jump through but said that meeting with CPRA went well. He thinks the state could eventually back a study of South Slidell exploring the feasibility of flood protection.

Hutchinson said the Levee Board will continue pushing for future flood relief and storm surge protection for the most vulnerable areas to the parish, many of which lay outside of city limits. As of today, Hutchinson said there is no protection in those areas, and any improvements would be made well into the future.